Religion – Fabulous Realmshttps://ashsilverlock.com
Worlds of Fantasy, Folklore, Myth and Legend
Mon, 19 Nov 2018 23:37:31 +0000 en
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1 http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/5c80173f53207b6a5e70a58625f6a9be?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs0.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngReligion – Fabulous Realmshttps://ashsilverlock.com
Realm of the Rising Sunhttps://ashsilverlock.com/2018/02/11/realm-of-the-rising-sun/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2018/02/11/realm-of-the-rising-sun/#respondSun, 11 Feb 2018 02:00:11 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=1813In Japan, as in China, there is a large pantheon of gods and demons, but whereas the Chinese mirror the bureaucracy of Earth in heaven, the Japanese pay homage through their state religion of Shintoism to a sun goddess, Amaterasu. Shintoists believe that almost 3,000 years ago Amaterasu sent her grandson down to Earth to be Japan’s first ruler, thus making the emperors of Japan her direct descendants – an actual divine family and not just a divinely chosen one. The persistence and survival of Shinto beliefs are remarkable phenomena in a country in which the majority of people are practising Buddhists. In part Shinto owes its longevity to political factors – it has been used periodically to bolster the authority of the state. Equally significant, however, is the way in which Shinto beliefs are meshed into the very fabric of Japan: into the physical landscape as well as the mental hinterland of traditions. For Shintoism (literally “The Way of the Gods”) has its roots in ancient nature worship: its first deities were the innumerable spirits – the kami or “beings of higher place” – that resided in mountains and waterfalls, or sacred groves of trees. Yet even now, when the emperors have renounced their claim to divinity, the gods have retained a place in Japanese affections. While, today, most these beliefs are consumed as entertainment – in manga or anime – there is nevertheless a sense in which for many Japanese they form an important part of national identity.

Mirrors are common at Shinto shrines, constituting one of the religion’s three main emblems alongside a necklace and a sword. By venerable tradition the mirror used to tempt Amaterasu out of the rock cave is the very one that is worshipped in the goddess’s primary temple at Ise in Mie Prefecture. The clearness of a mirror’s surface and the sharpness of its reflections represent an ideal for worshippers, who are encouraged to clear distorting clouds of passion from their minds and hearts so that they present untroubled images of their souls to the deity. The Kojiki recounts how the god Izanagi himself gave a mirror to his divine children and instructed them to view themselves in it morning and night; if they fixed their minds on the celestial and pure while driving out wickedness he said they would see a pure consciousness reflected. A mirror was often said to hold the very soul of its owner. In one celebrated story, a dying mother left a mirror to the daughter who had nursed her through a long illness that destroyed her good looks. The mirror was a marital gift from the dead mother’s husband – the girl’s father – and the faithful daughter was later comforted by the mirror’s reflection, in which she believed she saw her mother with her youth and beauty restored.

There is a Japanese custom of charms and talismans, or omamori. Some are worn, while others are pinned up on the gateway of a house to offer protection against contagions. One explanation for this protective practice attributes the god Susano with power over disease and foul plagues. The tale recounts how one stormy night Susano wandered across the lands of the Central Reed Plain, his poor clothing offering him scant protection from the elements. At the house of Kotan-Shorai, Susano knocked and asked for shelter. But Kotan was unimpressed by the stranger’s scruffiness and refused to grant him entry. Then Susano went to a nearby house, that of Somin-Shorai, Kotan’s brother. Opening his door Somin saw a sad traveller with the wind howling at his back and at once asked him in. He fed his guest and gave him sake to warm him, then showed him into a sleeping area to rest. The next morning, when Susano came to leave, he revealed his true identity and pledged that to the end of time Somin and his descendants would be free of the wicked spirits that cause disease, as long as they hung a sign at their gatepost to ward off the spirits. And since that day the Japanese have displayed notices on their gateposts identifying them as the descendants of Somin-Shorai.

Japan is a land of extremes: topographically varied and breathtakingly beautiful yet violently volcanic. For 600 years it was ruled by clan-based shogunates drawn from the samurai warrior class, men whose ethos derived from centuries of militaristic values first articulated in the traditional mythic tales of warring clans, heroic leaders and feats of valour and endurance – particularly the idealised role model provided by Yamato-takeru, the heroic son of an emperor. They glorified war and fearlessness, emphasising selfless sacrifice and total loyalty to one’s lord or daimyo. Bushido, a code developed in the mid-1600s, emphasised the duty of everyone to respect and honour those above them in the social pyramid. It built on Zen meditation’s philosophical strands; advocating concentration, discipline and sudden inspiration, Zen had a natural appeal for men who made ready for battle by preparing the mind to transcend the fear of death. But at the same time artistic culture was gradually encouraged to flourish and a governing class was set in place, which enabled modern Japan to emerge.

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2018/02/11/realm-of-the-rising-sun/feed/0painting-of-amaterasu-from-okamiashsilverlockFaith and Fantasy: American Godshttps://ashsilverlock.com/2017/08/20/faith-and-fantasy/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2017/08/20/faith-and-fantasy/#respondSun, 20 Aug 2017 02:00:05 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=1752Scary, gripping and often deeply unsettling, Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods has reached a new audience since being adapted recently as a television series. Placing it in a specific genre has however proved tricky since its publication – some have described it as urban fantasy while others label it as mythic fiction. One description that is as good as any, given the novel’s subject matter, is religious fantasy. A fantasy of religion is a text that depicts or makes use of commonly understood religious tropes, but which recasts them in the context of additional fantastic narrative elements. A clear example of this approach is the satire employed by James Morrow in his 1990 novel Only Begotten Daughter. Although it has a notionally science-fictional frame, being set a few years in the future and hypothesizing some near-future technologies, the overall effect of the book is clearly that of fantasy, as was recognised when it won the World Fantasy Award for its year. The book begins by following Murray Katz, a celibate lighthouse-keeper, who discovers that a sperm donation he has made has become a foetus: an immaculate conception. Overtaken by responsibility for his child-to-be, he brings home the ‘ectogenesis machine’ containing it, and ends up superintending the birth and childhood of the Daughter of God, Julie Katz. The body of the book follows Julie’s adulthood, as she arrives at her credo despite the best efforts of fundamentalist ministers and the Devil. Of course, fantasies of religion need not be as overtly revisionist as Morrow’s. Gene Wolfe is an author primarily known for science fiction rather than fantasy. His Catholicism is also a well-known part of his worldview; it is prominent in his most well-known work, The Book of the New Sun (4 vols, 1980-83). It is set on a far-future ‘Urth’, and many of the fantasy tropes that appear – wizards, magic and so on – can be understood from the text as, for instance, aliens or energy weapons. However, it cannot be denied that the experience of reading the series has many similarities with that of a religious fantasy. The unlikely protagonist, the torturer Severian, is a Christ figure sent and enabled to achieve the task of a new sun for a dying world. The many layers of imagery this invokes – Christ/Apollo, New Son/Sun, for instance – are left for the reader to understand.

Fantasies of religion often approach their subject obliquely or through misdirection. Nowhere is this more true than of G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). It begins in London with the recruitment of the poet Gabriel Syme by Scotland Yard to infiltrate a worldwide council of anarchists. When he does so, however, he discovers that each of the other members is also a spy with a similar mission. Each is codenamed for a day of the week – Syme is Thursday – and each takes their orders from the mysterious Sunday. Sunday himself is a figure increasingly mysterious the closer he is approached; his pronouncements imply that he is of more than earthly power. The book can certainly be read as an allegory of the Christian work of the difficulty of understanding God; but it is a very unorthodox kind of allegory. Both The Book of the New Sun and The Man Who Was Thursday were written by Catholics and may be read as providing paths to a religious understanding. John Crowley’s Ægypt quartet is neither as directly scathing as Morrow, nor as orthodox as Wolfe or Chesterton. It tells several stories, each nested within the other, but the most recent – the one from which the others seem to subtend – is that of Pierce Moffet. His academic career in New York having failed, he goes to an upstate rural retreat. There, in the village of Blackbury Jambs, he encounters again the work of the historical novelist Fellowes Kraft, whose books he read as a child. Kraft lived near the town, and Pierce is asked by his descendants to see if he can complete the novel Kraft left unfinished at his death. However, the plot of Ægypt matters less than the density with which it’s embedded with meditations of all kinds – some from fictional texts, some real – about history, religion, and how we make sense of things.

All the fantasies of religion described so far take Christianity as a starting-point, but the label can equally be applied to works which revise and critique other religions, including pantheistic ones. Prominent examples of the latter approach are Neil Gaiman’s linked novels American Gods (2001) and Anansi Boys (2005). American Gods sets out to answer a relatively simple question: if the USA is made up of immigrant populations of all kinds, each bringing with them their own religious stories about the world, what happens when all those stories interbreed? The book begins by following a recently released convict named Shadow, who is recruited by a mysterious man named Wednesday to work for him. Wednesday, it transpires, is the Norse God Odin, and he represents a group of similar deities, including Egyptian and Indian ones. They find themselves in opposition to more American gods, such as the deracination of culture and experience by consumerism. Though nothing is as it seems initially – no god is entirely to be trusted – American Gods does in the end bring home a sense of the costs of the New World. Anansi Boys is different from American Gods in tone and, although it shares some of the same assumptions, cannot be considered a direct sequel. The action of the book, much of it comic, follows the negotiation between a Londoner, ‘Fat Charlie’ and Spider, a brother of whom he had been unaware, for the legacy of their father – an incarnation of the African spider deity Anansi – but it also embodies the tension between tricksterish fantasy and the mundane world from which Charlie originates. Both Gaiman books have in common a sense that gods are stories we tell ourselves to make sense of things, and that they exist to the extent that we can vest belief in the stories.

Stories, though, are sometimes treasures to be concealed or uncovered. In the context of fantasies of religion, this often means that a deity’s existence or power is guarded by a secret society of some kind. The American fantasist Elizabeth Hand has written several books featuring one such society, the Benandanti, of which the most well known is probably Waking the Moon (1994). The Benandanti are described in the novel as a kind of puppet-master secret society, protecting the mundane world – and, indeed, shaping it – by holding back the return of the Moon Goddess. The Benandanti do have their roots in real events – specifically, as a kind of anti-witchcraft force in Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries – so Hand is able to use the weight of history to amplify and enrich the debate at the story’s heart. Finally, it is worth considering a work in this vein not set in our own world, Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods (1992), part of his well-known Discworld sequence. Its premise is that deities in the Discworld exist (like Tinkerbell) to the extent that people believe in them. The deity Om, now almost forgotten, is disappointed when he tries to manifest himself in the world: there is only enough belief to make him incarnate as a tortoise. He speaks to Brutha, a young but dim initiate in the church of Om, and the last remaining true believer in him. The body of Small Gods comprises Brutha’s slow earning of wisdom, but the most striking image from the book is that of the small gods themselves, encountered by the protagonist during his wanderings. These are the deities left entirely without believers but who may be associated with a specific place such as a crossroads. Hence, Pratchett imagines a Discworld in which gods are as plentiful as microbes are in our own world, and in which everything is holy. What seems to tie all of these novels of faith and fantasy together is what the individual writer brings to shape their material – it may be an urge to critique or revise existing dogmas or it may be that the writer feels certain ideas about our past and culture can only be made apparent by going beyond the facts and physics of the world we know.

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2017/08/20/faith-and-fantasy/feed/0americangods2ashsilverlockSpirits of the Sacred Skieshttps://ashsilverlock.com/2017/01/22/spirits-of-the-sacred-skies/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2017/01/22/spirits-of-the-sacred-skies/#respondSun, 22 Jan 2017 02:00:25 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=1705The ancient peoples of the vast continent of South America never formed a coherent cultural unit. They cannot, therefore be treated as such in describing their religions and mythologies. Thousands of languages and dialects were spoken throughout South America, but there were no writing systems before the Spanish conquest. The sources of ancient myths are therefore native oral records transcribed by Europeans or European-trained natives in Spanish, Portuguese or, in a few cases, Quecha (the language of the Incas), accounts by contemporary chroniclers and modern anthropological studies. Legends and mythological accounts, together with deductions based on archaeological evidence, constituted the religions of South American societies. Like all peoples, they felt compelled to explain the important things in their universe, beginning with where they came from and their place in the larger scheme of things. Despite the regional and cultural diversity of South America, there were common elements, some almost universal. In most regions, for example, there was a named creator god. Among the Andean civilizations Viracocha, with many variations, was the creator. Although his worship was prevalent among coastal civilizations, there was also confusion and/or rivalry with the supreme god Pachacamac. Among the Amazonian tribes, four almost universal themes can be recognised. First is the presence and power of shamans, and the associated use of hallucinogenic drugs to gain access into the spirit world for the wellbeing and guidance of humankind. Second is the belief in the power and ancient divinity of jaguars. Third is the practice of cannibalism and fourth, less widespread, is headhunting, a practice steeped in supernatural and ritual significance for the purpose of capturing an enemy’s soul.

Creator deities and creation myths feature in all the ancient South American cultures. Among the ancient civilizations of the Andes and the adjacent western coastal valleys, two supreme creator gods were particularly prominent: Viracocha and Pachacamac. The former had numerous manifestations and names, but most accounts portray him as a creator who once walked among the people and taught them. Pachacamac was somewhat more remote, more an oracle to be consulted than a missionary. Common features were the creation of the sun and the moon, and the emergence of humankind from underground. Most myths name the Titicaca Basin as the place of creation; indeed, so all-pervading was its importance that the Inca sought to link their own origin to Tiahuanaco in Titicaca, and went to great lengths to embrace the accounts of all the peoples they conquered. Among the rain forest tribes of the Amazon drainage, eastern coasts, pampas and Patagonia, accounts of creation are more discursive. All tribes have beliefs about where people came from and how they came into being, but there is less emphasis on detail, and wider variation in the place of origin. For example, humans came either from underground or from the sky. After creating the world, however, rain forest gods take little further interest in humankind’s day-to-day existence. A prominent theme is that jaguars were the masters of the earth before humans, and that the jaguars’ powers were acquired by humans after they had been adopted by jaguars and had betrayed them.

For the peoples of ancient Andean and coastal civilizations the endless cycle of time began with the daily movement of the sun across the sky and then progressed through seasonal change to repetitious decades to the religious concept of pachacuti, or the ‘revolution of time and space’. Andean and western coastal peoples believed in the existence of an overall supreme power, and that the course of history and civilization formed an inevitable succession of repetition and renewal. Collecting and collating their own beliefs and those of the peoples they conquered, the Incas believed in an elaborate succession of worlds or creations, inhabited by different races of beings and/or civilizations. Each ‘Age’ was referred to as being ruled over by a sun, and the general course of development was from the more primitive to the sophisticated. Each world ended in its destruction by some catastrophic event. Naturally, they considered the Inca Empire to be the supreme achievement in this progression, and manipulated the creation myths to convince themselves and their subjects of their divine right to rule. That the Spanish conquest has merely interrupted this course of events is embodied in the concept of Inkarri, the return of the Inca king.

The Incas regarded their emperor, Sapa Inca, as the divine sun’s representative on earth, and his principal wife, the Qoya, as the moon’s. Persistent iconography and religious imagery makes it logical to interpret these beliefs as the culmination of attitudes in earlier Andean civilizations. One pre-Inca example is the ruler Nayamlap in the Lambayeque Valley, who contrived with his priests to convince his subjects of his divine nature after death. Rich Moche, Sican and Chimu burials similarly indicate the development of the idea of divine kingship. Despite the official state view, however, rulership of the Inca Empire began and ended in rivalry – in the conflict between Urco and Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui over the succession to Viracocha Inca and when the Inca ideal of rulership by divine right of descent went awry in a bloody civil war, less than a decade before the Spanish conquest. Ancestor worship was widespread among Andean civilizations. Physical manifestations of such reverence are well documented among the Inca in the mummified remains – mallquis – of Inca rulers. Dedicated cults cared for mallquis, housed in the Coricancha Temple in Cuzco and accorded them special honours at ceremonies. Similarly, the mallquis of rulers and ancestors of provincial towns were kept in special buildings or in caves and honoured at ceremonies. The care for and elaborate nature of these burials, show that reverence for ancestors was a theme that began in the earliest Andean civilizations.

An integral part of ancient Andean religion was the designation of features and objects throughout the landscape as sacred sites. Known as huacas, such locations could be as large as a mountain or as small as a boulder; or a cave, spring, field or other place in which an important event had occurred, or an artificial object such as a stone pillar. Sacred places were individually significant and collectively linked by ritual lines, one elaborate system of which – the ceques – was used by the Incas. Ritual lines could be conventional terrestrial routes between huacas, or virtual networks – for example, lines of sight from one huaca to another on the horizon for astronomical observations. Similarly, in earlier cultures among the coastal valleys from Nazca in the south to Moche in the north, lines marked out in the desert landscape to form anthropomorphic animal, plant and geometric figures – called geoglyphs – were used as ritual pathways for ceremonial progressions. They appear to be lineage or kinship routes, some used for a single occasion, others over generations.

Every ancient culture of the Andes worshipped the sun; most also worshipped the moon, and observation and recording of the movements of the heavenly bodies were considered vital. As well as recognition of the importance of solar and lunar cycles, and their effects on the weather and seasons, the night sky – and in particular Mayu, the Milky Way – was regarded as a vast source of inspiration and mythic meaning. Mayu was seen as the celestial river, and its progression of positions through the night sky, tallied with the seasons, was the starting point for all calendrical correlations. In this vast galactic body, the Incas recognised not just points and regions of light, but also the dark bodies of stellar voids, the ‘dark-cloud constellations’ which, to them, were just as important. As with other major themes in Andean civilizations, imagery and iconography reveal the antiquity of sun worship, from deities with haloed radiations emanating from their heads to the sheet-gold sun masks of the Incas.

]]>https://ashsilverlock.com/2017/01/22/spirits-of-the-sacred-skies/feed/0apu_from_thor__hercules_encyclopaedia_mythologica_vol_1_1_0001ashsilverlocktenochlanuitweatherindianIndia’s Eternal Cyclehttps://ashsilverlock.com/2016/01/31/indias-eternal-cycle/
https://ashsilverlock.com/2016/01/31/indias-eternal-cycle/#commentsSun, 31 Jan 2016 02:00:20 +0000http://ashsilverlock.com/?p=1587In the Indian tradition, time is seen as non-linear – past, present and future co-exist in each generation. This theory underpins the doctrines of karma and samsara, the cycles of causality and rebirth. Indian religion has evolved over many centuries – its gods and goddesses have not been discarded but modified, and their attributes and roles have become fluid. It is this fluidity that has resulted in a rich body of stories and one of the world’s oldest unbroken traditions – India’s earliest religious texts are the four Vedas (‘books of knowledge’), which date from circa 1000 BC. Present-day India, as diverse in cultures and topography as ever, is imbued with ideas that can be traced back through millennia. There are few distinctions made between mind and matter, or humankind and nature. Hinduism, the most widespread religion in India (although just one of seven major faiths with Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Sikhism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism), is at once also a science, a lifestyle and a social system. The vast number of Hindu gods and goddesses can be bewildering, but beyond this variety lies unity, expressed in the unchanging, indestructible divine reality known as brahman that, according to Hindus, exists in all things. Everything in the universe, every creature and plant, is a manifestation of brahman and thus contains an element of the divine.

The multiplicity of Hindu deities merely reflects different aspects of the divine unity, and a symbol of the underlying connection is the trimurti, or triad, of the gods Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma. These gods are sometimes shown as three faces on a single statue symbolising three distinct functions: Brahma as the creator, Vishnu as the protector and Shiva as the destroyer of all things at the end of each cycle of time. Significantly, each deity derives his power from his goddess consort – Sarasvati, Lakshmi and Parvati, respectively. The key to understanding Indian philosophy’s different schools of thought lies not in logic but in the convention of vidya (unitary thought), which seeks to understand phenomena as a single system in which God and humankind are one. Enlightenment is believed to lie in realising infinite harmony with the universe. One of the later Hindu sacred texts, the Upanishads, expresses it thus: atman (the vital force in all things) is brahman (absolute truth). Another significant feature of Indian belief is the desire to transcend the chaos and unpredictability of the world in order to find the truth, nirvana (spiritual ecstasy) or enlightenment. From the earliest times, evidence suggests that people believed that they might achieve this goal through the practice of meditation.

The immense Indian subcontinent encompasses an astonishing diversity of geographical regions. The vast mountain range of the Himalayas inspired awe in all those who beheld it. Its peaks appeared to reach up out of the human world to touch the realms of the gods, and the range was regarded as sacred by both Tibetans and Indians as a transitional domain between the human and heavenly realms. Mount Meru, the mythical axis of the cosmos, lay at its centre. One legend credited the mighty god Indra with the formation of the mountains: it was said that they had been a herd of flying elephants who had displeased him. All the gods were thought to make sacrifices on the mountains, but Shiva was particularly associated with them. Mount Kailasa was his mythological paradise and, as an ascetic, his deep meditation on this mountain ensured the continued existence of the world.

The great river Ganges, which rises in the Himalayas and flows across north-east India, is sacred to the Hindus, who believe that bathing in her water will enable them to reach Indra’s heaven, Svarga, on Mount Meru. They also revere the holy city of Prayaga (now Allahabad), where the Ganges is joined by her two tributaries, the Yamuna and the subterranean Sarasvati. This is a place of pilgrimage so sacred that a tiny piece of its soil is believed to be capable of wiping away sin. Each of these great rivers was deified as a goddess, of which the most holy was Ganga, daughter of the mountain god Himavat and an aspect of the great mother goddess, Mahadevi. She was said to have emerged from the toe of Vishnu, and to have descended from heaven to cleanse the earth of the accumulated ashes of the dead. The ashes of the faithful are thus still committed to her care.

In the second millennium BC the early Indus Valley civilisation collapsed under the constant incursions of the Aryan invaders, a group of Bronze Age tribes. The Aryans believed in many gods, spirits and demons, many of whom are still venerated in India to this day, such as Indra, god of thunder; Varuna, keeper of order; Agni, a fire god; Surya, a sun god; and Yama, king of the dead. Followers of Buddhism and Jainism, two religions which arose in India in the sixth century BC, were also dedicated to the use of meditative techniques as a means of release from the cycle of death and rebirth. For Jains, the path to liberation demanded that stringent austerities be practised, while Buddhists emphasised the inward struggle. The adoption of many deities from other religions helped Buddhism in particular to spread and flourish. Within India, Buddhism was largely reabsorbed into Hinduism: the Buddha himself was said to have come into being as the ninth incarnation of the great Hindu god Vishnu. The continual absorption and assimilation of different beliefs is perhaps the dominant characteristic of Indian religion. Certainly, it has helped give rise to such a rich and varied mythology.